Ron Schneidermann

When internationalizing, start small. You can start with localizing for other English-speaking countries first: UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc. Start with smaller things before you commit to the harder localization elements.

It’s easy to underestimate how much language support slows down your product development lifecycle (by introducing cardinality): design takes 30% longer, coding, marketing, app store listing. This slows down velocity until you figure out how to operationalize it.

More often than not, it’s not a well-entrenched competitor who is your barrier to growth in a local market. It’s about what you don’t understand and what you’re not delivering yet in terms of product or monetization strategy.

There are different product-channel fits depending on the market and different strategies in different markets to generate revenue. Example: some countries don’t like annual renewing subscriptions.

When internationalising, you need to understand, for each country, where in the funnel you have the most leverage and opportunity and where you’re the weakest.

From qualitative research in 2015 (App Store reviews, Reddit, blog posts, etc.) they learned that people found $50/year to be too expensive. So they tested $15/year vs. $30/year and had pretty much the same revenue. But they went with the higher $30/year because it allowed some flexibility with promos, discounts, etc. They’re still experimenting with this.